floating in a tin can

jewsinspace
spaceodyssey

Time—something that work had always made easy to track—has long since ceased to function for Michael. It had effectively become meaningless back in May, but within the past few weeks, it’s gotten even more unclear how or why one day blurs into the next. Pills are put in his hand, food is put in front of him, he sleeps, he wakes up, it’s dark, it’s light. It doesn’t mean anything. Sounds echo emptily or seem muffled. It’s hard to focus. He can’t manage to write or doodle in his journal anymore. Even the prospect of talking to Lee is barely enough to get him to socialize. He wants to die more than ever.

His condition is thanks to a couple of things. A little while back, Lee had caught on to his starvation strategy; she’s far from stupid, and although it must have been disappointing to have to cut herself off from the bonus nutrition, she was adamant that he start feeding himself. He refused, explaining to her once again that he was simply a problem that needed to be solved, an imbalance that needed to be corrected—and to his shock, she went to the orderlies on him. He still doesn’t understand it. Lee can’t stand them, and the rules drive her crazy. Why would she do that to him? Why would she take that away from him, one of the only things left he could control about his life?

( birds were singing to calm us down )

jewsinspace
spaceodyssey

It’s been about three months since Michael Ginsberg dove off the top of his tenement building. A lot of things about that night come up blurry when he’s asked to think about them during therapy; they happened too fast and too close, like the pavement going by out a taxi window. Some things, though, are crystal clear. Suspended. The view from the roof; the rush of adrenaline; the beating of the wind; the weightlessness and relief of falling; the overwhelming, unforgiving solidity of that stupid car. The doctors said it was landing on the car that probably saved his life. It hadn’t been there when he’d looked down. What a fucking joke.

( i can't find the light in my heart )

jewsinspace
spaceodyssey

Lee Rosenberg almost never comes out of her room; like a ghost haunting the halls of the sanitarium, she’s more rumour than person. She’s barely even there at mealtimes, and when she is she sits by herself as far away from everyone else as possible despite the nurses’ urging to socialise. She refuses to socialise. It’s 1969 and she’s a schizophrenic transvestite homosexual Jew. She has nothing to say to these people.

But one day during group she shuffles out of her room and into the circle of chairs, sitting down with her head down and staring at the floor. She’s not dressed, like most everyone else, and her feet are bare. Her short hair is choppy and uneven like it was hacked off with a knife and the hems of her pyjama trousers are ragged like she’s been walking around in them for a long time. A shiny gold Magen David peeks out of the collar of her shirt. After a while she reaches into the pocket of her shirt and pulls out a packet of cigarettes, waiting for an aid to come around with a lighter, and she sits there smoking moodily and not contributing anything.

Someone makes a sarcastic kissing sound and the aid running the group shushes him but a few men chuckle knowingly. Lee says, “Fuck you,” gets up and leaves.

( we are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. )